Thanks a lot for your feedback, and here are some doubts/answers to your questions, if you can help me a bit with Visual novel solution please contact me on discord
- In V0.15(including hotfix) I have reduced grinding as much as possible, maybe adding to skip to any day might solve this.
- House Map is open all the time, and just click on location
- How can I improve the gameplay?
- I don't powerful GPU, so average render time is like 1.2 hours depending on scene and I am new. If I can turn it into Visual novel, how to do it cause I wanna use some coding used in sandbox like laptop and phone, so there is some interaction except that I wanna keep it as visual novel but sure how to do it. If I can overcome these or get some ideas I am willing to shift to visual novel since I get to focus only on renders less on coding and more people willing to play this game
- I added a detailed hint/walkthrough(that's what I call i know i am stupid) with the hotfix
- Lacks gameflow since creating a proper sandbox is challenging
well - for starters, you can't skip time anywhere, which ends in a click-feast (at least i didn't find any other way than skipping in your own room)
2nd: If you create a straight storyline, meaning you have to meet certain locations/interactions in a given order, then why do you create sandbox at all? Just tell the straight story in story mode (no grind - no search for the next trigger)
The biggest problem, most sandbox games encounter (imho), is that sandbox is used just for the sake of having freeroam, even where freeroam isn't beneficial. Sandbox only works fine, if you have MULTIPLE paths/tasks which you can solve ASIDE EACH OTHER in ANY order, so the player can decide what to do and when to do something.
This is very hard to code, as the different tasks may interfere with each other. (example: do A first, then B, so during B the character knows about A, but if you do B first, player can NOT know anything about A - so even with 2 paths, you have to script each path twice - to catch the different possible order. This will add exponnentially when doing more than 2 tasks at once.
Only solution would be that all tasks do NOT interfere with each other. If they don't interefere, the order to solve doesn't matter, so we are back to the question "why do sandbox at all?".
In short:
Sandbox is very hard to create in a propper way (nothing to suggest for a new dev imho), but it's an easy way to mess the whole game up.
The hard work you have to put into creating a propper sandbox game is not worth the benefit and too much risk to fail (just my personal humble thoughts).
PS: i have the newest version PLUS hotfix - so again: the "detailed walkthrough" still looks like a simple "hint system" for me and doesn't always show what to do (either empty or being vague like "find a better way to spy on...").
EDIT:
Just for example: (a bit overdone to show the point)
Imagine you are in your room at home on 2nd floor and need to go to class (as given necessary task to continue).
easy way "oh - i need to go to class -> (transition) -> you are in class, and the story continues (the whole game is about the story)
hard way (imho: unnecessary way): click leave room -> click go downstairs -> click main door -> on the map click on college -> at college click main door -> in main hall click corridor -> in corridor click classroom -> in classroom click "start class".
Hope you get what i mean by "unnecessary sandbox-clicking". Aside the need to code all the possible click-locations where you mostly tell players "under construction", "You don't need to get here" or "i better attend class first" ... and such shit
If you do a sandbox that player can decide what they want to do, then they should be able to do. If they want to visit the park instead of going to school, they should go to the park. But then there have to be consequences for skipping school - which is again more work of coding.
If you force the player NOT to visit the park, and NOT being able to skip school, then there is no real sandbox - and so on.
There is no need to buy a Ferrari if you only want to drive in town for shopping. Of course having a Ferrari is nice, and people like Ferrari, but it's the wrong car for a common family, and when they want to use it for grocery shopping it's the worst - such is sandbox mode for most AVN
